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29 June 2008

Summer is in full throttle around there, which means that weekends are devoted to 1) home improvement, and 2) hanging out. Yesterday, JM and I went to a brickyard for the first time. Very cool. We only needed 100 bricks for a little storage bench project JM has going as practice for redoing our brick patio, but we chose them, loaded them, and brought them home in our little car. Many squats and 3 bags of mortar (free mortar from friends!) later, we have a little brick structure in our back yard, hooray. In the meantime, I propagated moss, cleaned our LR rug (as in rented a carpet cleaner and everything), and made a cake to share with our mortar-sharing friends.

And today I finalized plans for my trip to Tennessee later in July, and also booked a flight to London for late September. Somehow having done that makes the onset of fall semester far more palatable. This afternoon, though, we are going to say goodbye to beloved colleagues and their awesome kids. It's also that time of year. {insert big, sad exhale here.}

25 June 2008

Given that the days are so long (which I looove), John and I opted for the long, 2.5 hour "Into the Wild" after dinner. After "Grizzly Man" I thought I'd had my fill of Alaska "survival" movies (sorry: spoiler). And now I really have. I mean, I guess the character in Wild was somewhat more compelling, and definitely a lot more sympathetic than the wild-eyed freako bear lover in GM. And Sean Penn gets a few extra degree-of-difficulty points for dramatizing severe hunger. Frankly I expected more scenes like the one 3/4 of the way through of the kid running around going "I'm hungry! I'm hungry!" because goodness knows that is what I would do. Hell, I do it just about every day around 4:30. This is why I am afraid to go backpacking.

But. Having not read the Krakauer book, but doubting that Krakauer is quite as self-seriously introspective as the movie, I wonder to what extent Penn was trying to portray this kid as some sort of hero/victim. And if he was a victim, then of what? His youth? "Society" (one of the Eddie Vedder original track titles, insert rolling eyes here)? Chance? Nature? After the movie I had the vague sense that Penn was all "I can't go to Alaska? Because I'm in Hollywood? But if I could, I'd be pretty tragic and shit too." Sigh. JM made the excellent point that this is where Grizzly Man was tons better: when Werner Herzog does the voiceover at the end and tells us, in his thick german accent, that people probably shouldn't fuck with nature, we know exactly where the director/producer guy stands. But with "Wild" all we really know is that Penn likes to make his cuts jumpy.

Oh, and Christian Bale's weight loss for "The Machinist" was far more impressive. So impressive that his weight loss is all I could remember about that movie; JM had to remind me what the plot was.

22 June 2008

I came across this image in co-working up a syllabus proposal for an UG course on "Writing, Rhetoric, and the Arts." Since it won't fly as the lead image on the syllabus itself, I'm including it here. I like how the handwriting conveys anger and impatience, as does the seeming hurriedness of the blue frame. The tri-color artistry is also noteworthy.

20 June 2008

19 June 2008

This post by Ianqui Doodle, and this nonsense courtesy of the president who will be remembered (by me) as the Nonsense President, and a discussion this evening on NPR about lifestyle changes people have made in response to the economy, food prices, and gas prices (all of course one complicated, inter-related bundle) all have me thinking too about what sort of future we're looking at in this here country.

Yesterday John and I walked eight blocks to our gym, and then on our walk home stopped to pick up this week's CSA bounty--arrow root and napa cabbages, red- and green-leaf lettuces, corn meal milled by the supply farm, broccoli, green onions, and something called kohlrabi (also kind of a cabbage). On the short walk home from there, we were marveling at how low maintenance life in Urbana is. Indeed, one of our many motivators for returning to Illinois was peak oil, news about which wasn't quite in the mainstream when we left Pittsburgh, but it was close. This is why we bought a house in the neighborhood close to campus, and it's why we invested in a bike trailer. We have train access to a major metro area, and we live in a walkable/bikeable small city that is surrounded--on the way outskirts--by farmland (which is key in the broad scheme of things). In other words, it's a relatively sustainable life. Oh, and as John pointed out, our good friends just moved nearby, so we have mostly everything we need--including our jobs--within a one mile radius.

Not bad.

But we are lucky. If we hadn't landed jobs at Illinois, we could easily be working in a place where it's not an option to live close to work, and where public transport (which is rather good here for a town of this size) sucks or is non-existent. My parents live in a rural area, and their fuel costs are climbing so high that my dad, ever the fan of a big roomy buick, just had a look at hybrids. (Hybrids really do need to become more affordable for more Americans, and frankly, they need to be even more fuel efficient, but that's another post.) My sister's family lives in suburban Knoxville, where walking isn't an option--there aren't really even sidewalks. And my niece will start driving next year. I wonder how long it will take before teenagers just stop driving so soon? Or at all?

Ianqui and some of the folks on NPR suggest that perhaps people will start to migrate back to cities, and this may happen in a trickly kind of way, but it's hard to imagine what such a migration--even a trickly one--would do to housing markets, etc. Or what it would mean for food availability. It's all very disconcerting.

Of course all this could lead to a passionate appeal for people to vote for Obama in November, even though that's not what I intended to do (updated to add: appeal, that is! You're damn straight I intend to vote for him!). He has his eye on all this stuff and sees the folly of wasting so many lives and dollars in Iraq--dollars that would be far better spent developing alternative fuel sources, and building a new (and modest) economy around restructuring this country, sustainably.

17 June 2008

A few weeks ago, I went to see "The Visitor" with my friend J. If you haven't seen it, it's a good, if predictable, film about immigration in the U.S, or, to use a term of Burke's that I like, about the bureaucratization of the imaginative. The main character, Walter Vale, is played by Richard Jenkins, who played the dead dad on Six Feet Under. Jenkins makes the short leap to playing dead wood here, starring as a burnt-out economics professor at a liberal arts school (Connecticut College) who holds a degree from--this got some laughs in the theater I was in--the University of Illinois. Vale is currently on a one-course load, with a reduction to work on his nonexistent book, and he's teaching the large lecture course he claims to have taught every year for twenty years. The filmmakers, in order to establish how burnt out he is so that they can move on to the real substance of the film, which takes place in Manhattan, show him "updating" his syllabus with a little bottle of white out, listlessly blotting out the "6" in 2006, presumably to replace it with a "7." But everyone who has updated a syllabus knows this wouldn't work; the dates would be all screwy.

Walter Vale and his white out are on my mind this afternoon as I set about updating a syllabus of my own. Mind you, only twice have I been able to repeat the same course, so I'm no Walter Vale, but it is so much easier to update a syllabus than it is to create one anew. It's also fun. I get to relive meetings that went well and revise those that did not. This is a graduate seminar on Aristotle's Rhetoric that I have blogged about here before. Indeed, a couple of photographs from that class were in blogos's second post ever. Aw.

What else is fun about updating? On the more brainy side, there's the opportunity to search and read new stuff that has been published since I last taught the class. And on the more mundane side, I bet I'm not alone in taking perverse pleasure in the mere act of consulting the university's academic calendar to see when classes will begin this fall, when Thanksgiving lands, and when it's all over. Somehow distilling a course down to fifteen days and a few pages makes it all seem entirely doable. But I have also always liked calendars and schedules--they appeal to my big-picture side, the side that needs to know what needs to be accomplished and what will be happening in the coming months.

And the fact that I'm not even a little bit sad to be returning to teaching after a sabbatical? This tells me I'm in the right profession and will hopefully never find myself as despondent about my job as the white-out wielding Walter Vale.

12 June 2008

Today felt like a regular day during the semester, which=no time to write in the morning (running and reading took priority), and a jampacked day on campus. Sounds like a drag, right? Wrong! The combination of things I had scheduled was quite invigorating--a little meeting with a department head about an organization I care about; lunch with a dear colleague; an outstanding special fields exam where we got to talk about ecology, race, affect, animals, and lots of other issues vexing American literary studies; and then a skype-chat with advisee from the field, where we talked about strategies for managing archives (dig, write, dig, write), and microformed newspapers (sit waay back and skim). Since she skypes from a mac, which means there's video, it was just like she was sitting in my office, but for the big bright blue room and the portrait of a moustached man over her shoulder.

So yes, things in my campus office are whirring back to life, except for that voicemail on my office phone from May 29 (oops), and the clock on my wall that stalled at 4:45, who knows when.

09 June 2008

Of my gmail "status" messages (little tags that tell gmail buddies what I'm busy doing), the one I find myself selecting most frequently is "reading4others." Included under this capacious status is work I do as a graduate advisor, as a colleague, or a favor (side note: I haven't forgotten about those of you I saw at RSA and whose stuff I promised to read--I'm getting there). Other status messages, such as "editing book reviews" or "reviewing" could well fall under reading4others if they did not have their own designations. Like a lot of mid- to advanced-career people, then, I read a lot of other people's prose. A typical afternoon for me includes some form of reading4others (I try mightily to reserve mornings for my own stuff). And in the course of all this reading4others, I have isolated some words and phrases that, let's just say, aren't my favorites. This doesn't mean that my own prose is free from these or its own very special tics. Let's just take the two that top my list of words most pieces could live without:

1. the way in which. This phrase is flat-out unnecessary. It's cumbersome, to boot. It often comes rolling in when someone is identifying the peculiar scope of an article/chapter/book, unfurling like a big plush red carpet or something. And like furling red carpet, it signifies that something big is coming. But words are not royalty or celebrities, and this phrase doesn't say anything that a simple "how" can't also say. Witness:

"This book examines the ways in which affect animates language." vs."This book examines how affect animates language."

Several years ago I was riding a bus home from campus, and two undergraduates in front of me were mocking their instructor. One busted out an imitation that went something like "Let's not forget, class, the ways in which gender is constructed." Her friend laughed and laughed. And, I admit, so did I. It's true that academics come to rely on such phrases, especially orally. In fact, my secret suspicion is that "the ways in which" migrated from the oral to the written, beginning in the oral as something like filler. It's true that it's a lot better than "um." But still.

2. precisely. This one starts with a story. A few years ago, I shared a grant proposal with a sr. colleague whom I both feared and admired, a very well known, and brutally blunt, scholar who had by that point read more than her share of this sort of meta-writing, the reflective/projective writing about the writing that will happen or has happened or is happening. She preferred to insert her comments directly in the middle of my writing, marked by brackets and also by all caps. The effect was somewhat jarring, but it matched well with the kinds of things she had to say. I don't remember many of the specifics of her feedback, though I can assure you that I followed all of her suggestions and got good results. I do, however, remember what she typed after I used the word precisely, because it made me laugh and laugh. She wrote something like this: [WHEN SOMEONE USES THE WORD PRECISELY WHAT FOLLOWS TENDS TO BE ANYTHING BUT PRECISE.] Wow, I thought. She is so right. She was definitely right about that particular instance, but I suspected her take on all the other instances of the word precisely was not quite right. For the past four years, though, I have noticed the word "precisely" everywhere, and about 85% of the time it is in fact followed by a sweeping statement, a very confusing clause, or a demolition derby of concepts. My view on "precisely" then, is not that it's too bulky, but that it insists a bit too much. As with trash talk, if one is to use it, one had better be able to back it up.

05 June 2008

1. Today I read JM's latest chapter, this one on the economics of bohemia, and while an allusion to a Wordsworth line was completely lost on me--I think my marginalia read "does this refer to something, or is it just trying to be fancy?"--I nevertheless suggested (in another section of course) a kick-ass reference to Def Leppard.

2. Another of my graduate students has gone to another country for a few months of dissertation research. She keeps in better contact with me than the ones right here in town who seem to be taking the summer off from email.

3. Grumble, grumble.

4. A certain listserv has been the stage for some complaints about the journal I work on as book review editor. But yesterday the editor wrote in and (hopefully) ended it. I am grateful to be working with this particular editor. He's got principles and isn't afraid to make them known. Rah, principles.

5. I read Derrida's piece on animals today, and his riff on the shame he feels on being seen naked by a cat reads an awful lot like Aristotle's bit on shame and animals in Book II of The Rhetoric, only with more circumlocutions. What is up with that?

6. I am at a place in some writing I am doing about some 18th-century dudes where I have written enough that I know what I'm going to say. Sometimes that can be a killjoy.

7. JM's chapter prompted a conversation about John Edwards, who I think will go on to do great things vis-a-vis poverty, a la Al Gore and the environment.

8. Words like vis-a-vis and a la are pretty convenient.

9. If I were the kind of person who complained about heat, I would be complaining about it right now. But instead I'll come up with devious ways to complain without really complaining.

04 June 2008

Last night the tornado sirens sounded just when Barack Obama was settling in to his sharp critiques of John McCain. When C, J, and S joined us in our basement, and our crank radio helped us determine that the local weather guy didn't know a whole lot more than we did, we all decided the sirens were a local republican conspiracy.

I get pretty nervous when those sirens go off, but it's also the case that my nerves were piqued from watching Obama's speech. I'm so pleased for the Obama campaign, and I'm cautiously excited for this country--cautiously because who knows what the summer and fall hold, and because people's shortsightedness has repeatedly disappointed me. I'm tempted to say that Clinton was a far more formidable opponent than McCain, kind of like when the NCAA bracket designers put the scrappiest teams on the same side. But. Given the work these primaries have done to generate interest among so many groups who have previously (and understandably) not really cared about elections, and given the really impressively bad job our current administration is doing, it stands to reason that democratic voters will show an unprecedented turnout in the fall. So I'm optimistic, but my optimism has a jittery cast.

If the dems can't do it this year, I might well move down to our cold, dark basement.